Nicktoons Racing

"'Oh, who drives in a pineapple on your PC?' 'SPONGE-BOB SQUARE-PANTS!!!!'"

I didn't know if I'd like the Nickelodeon characters in Nicktoons Racing(NR) I'd never heard of, but I suspected I'd have fun beating them. Quashing my brief hopes that they would go retro and either put Dangermouse in the field(still, there was a secret character, so I did dare to wish...a bit) I stuck with SpongeBob SquarePants at first, whose exploits in overpriced fifty-page paperbacks at Borders sufficiently charmed me enough to spend over an hour rifling through them all before walking out empty-handed, feeling slightly guilty about not even buying a bean-bag SpongeBob. Then I was surprised to be racing against my old favorite, Stimpy, so I picked him up before switching to Patrick Star. But I would have probably enjoyed myself even racing as a Rugrat or the baffling CatDog. The game is too irrepressibly cheery and so its penchant for unexpectedly kicking a leader to the other end of the pack can be taken in stride as a challenge. I have to tell you that this sort of racing beats Chicago parking--the streets are more colorful and you don't have to worry too much about crashing into a brick wall, much less the bumper of the Lexus behind you that probably belongs to some well-connected snob or the possibility of street cleaning this week.

Although you have a nice feature in relay races(each lap with a different favorite character,) two-player challenges(one person should use joystick for this) or win-streak mode(win bigger trophies until you lose) the three cup circuits provide the race circuits these alternate modes spring from. Each circuit has four six-car races, and you must keep above a certain place in order to qualify for the next one. On easy mode you need only be third, but medium requires second and hard first. You also have three race restarts before you need to try the cup again, and the big risk here is finishing a race and slipping more points than you thought you would(10/7/5/3/1/0 for the places respectively) before you can reset. At the end of the third cup on easy mode, the mystery rider is revealed, and you can play on normal, which actually has abnormal things such as getting zapped from behind by a weapon while you're in sixth place, although it does force you learn to use all of the controls.

NR requires use of such exotic keys as the shift, control, and backspace. For some reason I am still in awe of programs that use them, after how useless they were for programming my old Apple basic non-games. They're all lumped pretty close to the arrows, which gives the game a controller feel. The first few courses, you can probably just swerve everywhere with the arrows, but then you'll need to use control to break or learn about how the back arrow gets you out of a jam before everyone else gets too far ahead. Shift also jumps and combined with arrows allows you to take corners easier--if you remember. Backspace allows you to use the gems you've picked up on the course for a burst of speed. Normally they determine your maximum speed but if you're about to hit a new lode or are near the finish line, so much the better, but just don't use them before a turn...

Although you'll need to collect gems on the racetrack, it's probably more fun to collect present boxes. Inside these boxes are devious weapons that can knock your opponents off course. Bubbles or jellyfish missiles cause a crash, Tommy's baby powder which blinds you is clever enough and relatively harmless if you know the path, so it makes up partially for the Rugrats, whom I otherwise detest, being in the game at all. There are plenty of flashes of light to spin you around or even sticky green goo that pulls you back, although my favorite is the trash can that slows you down before you throw it off your head--it's even more fun to see it happen to someone you've zipped past. The best part of all this is that you can be caught by the trap you laid. These generally aren't too hard, but it's more annoying to run into various outcroppings. On early levels you may get away with hugging a wall, but later your swerving will need fine-tuning as the wall will just nudge in, or a street lamp will appear at the edge, and bam, your momentum's gone. In one nasty section there is a speed-up just before, and you wind up ramming into the wall several times over unless you're very careful.

The systems of ramps(don't crash into the side of THEM) and barriers and curves get more complex later as helpful arrows drop out of sight on turns. The city scene features night and day, and obstacles seem to jam you in place more. By the end it becomes very hard to place first, and even though I've won each cup on aggregate, a four-race sweep has eluded me.

Part of this seems due to chance. Although you get a few retries, often you'll need them just because you happen to be just ahead of the driver who got the power-up a couple of times, and you get hit with a nasty one that takes you out of commission for a while. Other times after having spun around by a missile you won't be able to see much--including the right way to go. Still, the game usually makes your opponents imperfect even if they do know the spots that you frantically avoid the first lap because they don't look like you can drive through them. Once I made the cleverest move of my short racing career; with the finish line perpendicular to the race track, I cut in to the left and behind an opponent and with a quick turn I crossed the line :09 ahead, without traveling as far. Often you'll rush past one that's smacked into a huge crate and if you character's not nice he may even laugh at them instead of cheer his fortune. But other times during the first race the guy in the lead may just start picking up gems and presents, and it is impossible to catch up. Still, when things work well, it is fun to scheme before the final race of what you need to shut the opponents out. Call it pre-emptive gloating, to add to the fun.

Of course the game wants to be fair to each show, so it has many sorts of caves and city surroundings and so forth. I can't precisely place which area goes with which cartoon, but the SpongeBob-inspired under-sea and frigate levels(smokey cannons fog a jump) are even more pleasing than his jaunty pineapple car with the leafy tailpipe. CatDog has some strange construction area, and later levels seem to have a medley of glowing tunnels(the closest thing to a cop-out, but it takes a while to recognize them due to the different color schemes,) monster jump-ramps and more familiar areas such as the Rugrats' living room or a town market and dining area make the game plenty surreal. There are also enough candy-lands with rope bridges and weird color schemes that even if you don't know what they allude to, you don't mind playing them. Some of the details even invite strategy; you can drive under the uprights of a billboard to shave off some time. Others are slightly gross, such as Stimpy driving a kitty-litter box. There's even a handy continuum at the bottom where you can see how each contestant is doing as his face glides across--more reliable than the marquee that often informs you you've jumped from sixth to first.

A few weeks back I'd played Smurf Racer, and it seems as though this game is taken from largely the same engine, but with some notable improvements. First of all, the characters and their cars look different. They actually react on finishing the race, and the cars tilt as you steer. There are several power-ups that mess up opponents differently. The disorientation may be nasty but adds a definite challenge, and the levels of difficulty mean you may replay this quite a bit to win everything. Your characters can also get more yucks acting spastically, and there are just more races, period, with the necessity of deferring real-estate to each shows forcing commendable variety. So the clever details push NR over the top for such a short game, and as it is one of my very best recent bargain purchases I really do recommend it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/10/02, Updated 12/10/02